Terrorism

Weimar Germany, 1918-1933…and the USA in the Present Era

by

Victor Davis Hanson has published an article titled Weimar America, which begins with the line:

Something eerie, something creepy, is happening in the world—and now in America as well. 

Hanson sees some very disturbing similarities between Weimar then and the USA now.  Definitely read the whole thing.

Recent events in the US, such as the level of sympathy for Hamas and the outbreaks of virulent anti-Semitism, seem to have taken many people (not including Hanson) by surprise. But this has been building for a long time.  Hanson’s article reminds me that in 2016, I wrote a post titled The United States of Weimar? and updated it a month later.  I’m republishing these posts here, following the page break.  Some of the links may not work anymore.

Read more

Sympathy for the Devil

by

Surveys show a disturbing degree of support for Hamas–and even justification of the October 7 atrocities–among younger Americans…and also, following the posting of Osama bin Laden’s ‘Letter to America’ recently on TikTok, a significant number of people–again, especially younger ones reading it for the first time–reacted favorably to his message.  Anti-Israel views among the young are significant enough that even the rather lame support of Israel offered by the Biden administration has resulted in negative poll numbers.

What is going on here?…What is driving the sympathy toward enemies of Israel and America, even ones who have clearly and provably committed horrible atrocities?

Wesley Yang, at X, said:

When we made the succession from a text based culture to a streaming one, all prior knowledge instantly evanesced, reformatting all prior culture and leaving a blank slate In the resulting brave new world children can know they are the opposite sex, mass murderers of civilians are heroes of resistance — and Osama Bin Laden is a profound and wrongly maligned truth teller. 

Anything can happen now.

I do think that the characteristics of a media type as well as its content have an influence, as McLuhan argued long ago; I’ve written about that point recently.  And it’s well known that social media algorithms tend to amplify extreme and emotion-driving points of view–and furthermore, given TikTok’s corporate parentage, it’s quite possible that there has been consciously-malign algorithmic behavior directed by the CCP.  But types of medium and editorial behavior (these algorithms do significantly mimic the role of a traditional editor) by no means the whole story; the degree of acceptance of the ideas that Hamas-is-good and Bin Laden-Wasn’t-So-Bad point to some deep problems in American education and American society.

The late Dr. David Yeagley, a Comanche Indian (traditional name ‘Bad Eagle’) and college professor, described an interaction that took place in one of his classes. (excerpted)

“LOOK, DR. YEAGLEY, I don’t see anything about my culture to be proud of. It’s all nothing. My race is just nothing.”

The girl was white. She was tall and pretty, with amber hair and brown eyes. For convenience’ sake, let’s call her “Rachel.”

I had been leading a class on social psychology, in which we discussed patriotism – what it means to be a people or a nation. The discussion had been quite lively. But when Rachel spoke, everyone fell silent.

“Look at your culture,” she said to me. “Look at American Indian tradition. Now I think that’s really great. You have something to be proud of. My culture is nothing.”

Her words disturbed and offended me in a way that I could not quite enunciate.

and

When Rachel denounced her people, she did it with the serene self-confidence of a High Priestess reciting a liturgy. She said it without fear of criticism or censure. And she received none. The other students listened in silence, their eyes moving timidly back and forth between me and Rachel, as if unsure which of us constituted a higher authority.

Yeagley saw a resemblance between Rachel and those Frenchwomen who were quick to associate with the conquering Germans…and he wondered:

Who had conquered Rachel’s people? What had led her to disrespect them? Why did she behave like a woman of a defeated tribe?

The interaction that Dr Yeagley described took place more than 20 years ago.  The individuals marinated in the intellectual climate in which the student was steeped have, in many cases, grown up to be professors or teachers inculcating a later and probably even worse version of the attitudes that she voiced.

Yeagley also cited a Cheyenne saying:  “A people is not defeated until the hearts of its women are on the ground.” I don’t have any quantitative data on gender mix, but it’s been observed that a high % of anti-Israel extremists–like those tearing down the ‘kidnapped’ posters and the three just charged with arson at an Israeli defense factory in the US–are female.  Would a wise Cheyenne advise us to be very worried?

(The Yeagely passage was cited and discussed in my 2020 post Bad Eagle’s Question)

The constant lectures about how bad our society is, how Americans are dangerous people who are on a hair trigger to attack Muslims or gay people or minorities…all of these things have surely had an effect on America’s civilizational self-confidence, especially among those who are too young to remember anything else.  As Chris Ferguson said at X:

The modern approach to US history is the equivalent of telling people to think of the worst thing they’ve ever done. Then think about it over and over, everyday, without any positivity or relief. Then, later, wonder why everyone is neurotic.

A commenter on that thread noted  that “in all the recent hoopla over identities, kids’ development of an American identity has been completely ignored.”  (emphasis added)

Read more

Protest or Insurrection?

by

The protests that quickly morphed into rioting and mass looting began with an arrest of a career felon for trying to pass a counterfeit bill. He had been convicted of felony home invasion and robbery in Texas and served 5 years in prison. According to several unreliable sites, he was”turning his life around” and was involved with a church. That argument is somewhat diminished by the fact that he had Methamphetamine and Fentanyl in toxic levels at autopsy. The reaction in Minneapolis was extreme and horrific.

Some of the destruction can be seen here the next day.

It got worse, much worse.

The spineless leftist Mayor is now seeking $55 million form somebody to repair damage he might have prevented.

Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey will seek state and federal aid to rebuild city structures following over a week of looting and rioting, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported Friday.

Some 220 buildings have been damaged and require at least $55 million in repairs, the city’s Community Planning & Economic Development department said earlier this week, noting that the city was “not yet ready to produce a credible estimate.” City Council members warned that the costs will likely be far higher, while Mayor Frey said damages could reach into the “hundreds of millions.”

Typically, he tried to seek approval from black rioters and was expelled from the meeting.

He was elected on a platform of fighting “global warming.”

A pretty good explanation of what is behind all this.

For white liberals, a black identity shaped by rage is not only to be condoned, but celebrated. All politics is identity politics to liberals, because the whole object of their existence is to invent one’s identity according to therapeutic needs. That is why the progressive movement took up the cause of transgender rights with such passion: To change one’s gender is the ultimate expression of self-invention in defiance of nature and tradition.

Read more

There is a plan here.

by

Patriot_Prayer_vs_Antifa_protests._Photo_11_of_14_(25095096398)

The present rioting, which is occurring in cities that have leftist Mayors and administrations, is part of a plan. We have seen this slowly coming together. The “Black Lives Matter” theme goes back for years. It is increasingly radicalized. The election of Donald Trump made everything about politics.

An article in Bazaar from a few days ago: If you are married to a Trump Supporter, Divorce Them:

Supporting Trump at this point does not indicate a difference of opinions. It indicates a difference of values…You do not need to try to make it work with someone who thinks of people as “illegals.” Just divorce them

This would be amusing if it were not behind the latest attack on civilization. Are we becoming the Weimar Republic ?

In 2002, a pro-Israel event at San Francisco State University was interrupted by ‘protestors’, screaming things like “go back to Russia!” and “get out or we will kill you!’ and shoving Hillel students against a wall. Laurie Zoloth, a campus Jewis leader “turned to the police and to every administrator I could find and asked them to remove the counter demonstrators from the Plaza, to maintain the separation of 100 feet that we had been promised. The police told me that they had been told not to arrest anyone, and that if they did, ‘it would start a riot.’ I told them that it already was a riot.”

That, of course, was San Francisco, ground zero in the war on civilization, which is being directed from walled compounds in rich areas.

The insurrection, which is going on now, is an attempt to create another Kent State event, which would radicalize more young people as that event did. The Governor of Minnesota, who daughter seems to be a participant in the riot direction is desperate to find a “white supremacist” to blame.

So far, he has been blaming “outsiders,” a claim that has been proven false. Few of those arrested gave other than Minnesota addresses.

KARE11 reviewed 36 arrests on the Hennepin County Jail roster and found that 86% of the arrests they reviewed had a Minnesota address.

Following the revelation, Mayor Carter and Mayor Frey said that the information about rioters being from out of the area was inaccurate, according to KARE11.

Mayor Carter blamed the police for providing bad information.

Minneapolis Police spokesman John Elder said that he believes many of those arrested gave false addresses.

Oh, OK.

Read more

Is this mass shooting linked to others ?

by

Today there was a mass shooting event today in El Paso Texas, in a Walmart.

There is some evidence that the mass shooting took place in a “Gun Free Zone.” This is still being sorted out. I live in Arizona and have a CCW permit, but I usually do not carry a gun. I do have one in my car. I do see quite a few shops that do not allow guns inside.

There is some evidence that that the shooter may be Hispanic, but the story resembles the New Zealand Shooter who attacked a mosque. In that case also there was a “manifesto” giving his motives.

With both of these incidents with mass shootings, there is some resemblance to the incident in Norway where a “white supremacist” attacked children at a Socialist summer camp on an island.

The Norwegian Police arrested Anders Behring Breivik, a 32-year-old Norwegian right-wing extremist,[25] on Utøya island[26] and charged him with both attacks.[27] His trial took place between 16 April and 22 June 2012 in Oslo District Court, where Breivik admitted carrying out the attacks, but denied criminal guilt and claimed the defense of necessity (jus necessitatis).[28] On 24 August, Breivik was convicted as charged and sentenced to 21 years of preventive detention in prison, the maximum sentence allowed in Norway. The sentence can be extended indefinitely as long as the prisoner is deemed a threat to society.

What is going on here?

Breivik is linked to a 1,518-page compendium entitled 2083: A European Declaration of Independence bearing the name “Andrew Berwick”.[31][32][151] The file was e-mailed to 1,003 addresses about 90 minutes before the bomb blast in Oslo.[152][153] Analysts described him as having Islamophobic views and a hatred of Islam,[154][155] and as someone who considered himself as a knight dedicated to stemming the tide of Muslim immigration into Europe.

What about New Zealand?

the posts suggest that every aspect of the shootings was designed to gain maximum attention online, in part by baiting the media. The shooter live-streamed the attack itself on Facebook, and the video was quickly shared across YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram. Before committing the act, he shouted, “Remember, lads, subscribe to PewDiePie,” a reference to Felix Kjellberg, who runs YouTube’s most subscribed-to channel. The phrase itself is a meme started by PewDiePie’s fans, and its goal is to be reprinted.\

In both cases, the shooter surrendered and was not killed. Why? They seemed to want a public forum for their causes. The El Paso shooter also surrendered. We will see what the motive was.